Up until today, I always had the impression that cloud storage was pretty expensive and I’m sure that many will agree with me. It’s a good thing that some bright minds over at Google have the same impressions as they now have drastically discounted the monthly storage plans on Google Drive. Let’s hope that the new prices aren’t temporary just to draw some more attention to Google Drive and that they will be here for a long while.

The new monthly storage plans and their previous prices are as follows: $1.99 for 100GB (previously $4.99), $9.99 for 1TB (previously $49.99), and $99.99 for 10TB. Google says that one terabyte is enough for you to “take a selfie twice a day for the next 200 years and still have room left over for”. But I’m sure that you have many other important pictures that you will want securely saved on the cloud. The storage will be synchronized and will work across Drive, Gmail and Google+ Photos. services. Also, the 15GB plan remains free, just like before. Here’s what Google said on the official blog:

Having launched Google Drive just two years ago, we’re excited that so many people are now using it as their go-to place for keeping all their files. Whether it’s all the footage of your kids’ baseball games, the novel you’re working on, or even just your grocery list for the week, we all have files that are too important to lose. Today, thanks to a number of recent infrastructure improvements, we’re able to make it more affordable for you to keep everything safe and easy to reach on any device, from anywhere.

If you want even more storage, 20 TB per month is accessible for $199 and 30 TB for $299. Sure, there aren’t too many folks who need that much space, as most of us will need a maximum of 100 gigabytes per month and that in some cases. The 2 dollar plan per month means that the price for a gigabyte gets down to an incredibly low price of only two cents per month. So, with this, the old expression “my two cents” gains a new meaning.

This is a really big hit for the competition, despite the fact that many established cloud storage players havee better integration across platforms. What will matter in the end will be the price. To make it easier, we’ll see how much you will end up paying with other service. At the moment, OneDrive offers 100 GB at $50 per year for 100GB which equals just over 4 cents per month per gigabyte. Box offers 100GB of storage at $5 per month, which means a GB will cost you 5 cents. With Dropbox, the storage is more expensive with $10 a month for 100GB, so you pay 10 cents for a gigabyte.

Google can reach much more users than Box and Dropbox, because there are so many who use Google’s services. It will be interesting to see if Mountain View will decide to aggressively promote its new cheap storage services. If it does so, then competitors will simply be obliged to lower the prices, as well. Sign up for one of these new Google Drive plans by going at at www.google.com/settings/storage.